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The Jihad Next Door

The eight men, beards trimmed, explosive belts fastened, pistols and grenades concealed in their clothing, waited until nightfall before stealing across the flat, porous Iraqi border. They navigated the berms and trenches along the frontier, traversing two-way smuggling routes used to ferry cigarettes, livestock, weapons — and jihadis to enter the northeastern Syrian province of Hasaka. It was August 2011, the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, and Syria was five months into a still largely peaceful uprising against President Bashar al-Assad.

Their leader was a Syrian emissary from the al Qaeda affiliate forged in the bloody conflict next door. He called himself Abu Mohammad al-Golani, and the young fighter, about whom little is known for sure except that he is a veteran of that war against the Americans in Iraq, had been authorized by his boss, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and al Qaeda’s central command to set up a Syrian offshoot of the notorious group. His mission, made clear in subsequent public statements, was nothing less than to bring down the Assad regime and establish an Islamic state in its place. No one knew it at the time, but that trip across the border would turn out to be a crucial turning point in the Syrian civil war, a key factor in the metastasizing of an internal conflict into a regional conflagration that now threatens the regime in Iraq as well as Syria.

Before Golani’s nighttime trek from Iraq into Syria, al Qaeda was looking increasingly like a spent force. Osama bin Laden had been killed a few months earlier. His successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, had bin Laden’s passion but little of his charisma, and the Middle East was still in the throes of the so-called Arab Spring, experimenting with peaceful protests rather than violence as a means to bring about change.

But over the next few years, at times even aided by the cynical Assad regime, Golani would rejuvenate the al Qaeda brand and establish a firm base in Syria. His group, called Jabhat al-Nusra l’Ahl as-Sham (meaning Support Front for the People of the Sham, an Arabic term encompassing Damascus, Syria and the Levant), would create a whole new generation of jihadists from around the Islamic world, fighters who have become a crucial force in a Syrian civil war that has claimed well over 140,000 lives and displaced nine million Syrians, both internally and into neighboring countries.

Just as dangerously, Nusra’s very success would create a massive rift with its jihadist parent organization, the al Qaeda affiliate known as the Islamic State of Iraq. By April of 2013, that group would rebrand itself as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, a new name that indicated its transnational ambitions. By this June, ISIL (also known as ISIS) had become so powerful that it would brazenly undertake a blitzkrieg-like advance across northern and western Iraq, rapidly capturing the Iraqi cities of Mosul and Tikrit and underscoring the seeming irrelevance of Zawahiri and the old al Qaeda leadership, somewhere in hiding off in South Asia, far from the newest jihadi battlefields.

Now, as a result of ISIL’s victories, U.S. President Barack Obama, a man who campaigned on extricating the United States from “dumb” wars in the Middle East, finds himself potentially embroiled in another one. He is sending a small contingent of special forces to work with the Iraqi military, but many in Washington are urging him to take more decisive action against the ISIL militants sweeping across Iraq, seizing territory and oil facilities and threatening to sow chaos in Baghdad and beyond.

This was not inevitable. The Syrian revolution—and the hesitant, confused international reaction to it—paved the way for the resurrection of a militant Islam that would turn vast regions of Iraq and Syria into borderless jihadi strongholds and inch closer to redrawing the map of the Middle East—in practical terms if not on paper. This is the story, pieced together over several trips into Syria and rare interviews with highly placed jihadi commanders on the front lines, of how it happened.

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It began, in mid-2011, with the Syrian regime’s suspicious release of hundreds of jihadis from prison—a move that served Assad’s strategy of presenting the uprising at once as a plot by Islamist extremists, agents of Israel and the West and a small number of disillusioned citizens with legitimate gripes who had fallen prey to “foreign conspirators.” It also played, unwittingly or not, into Golani’s hands.

KEY PLAYERS

Abu Mohammad al-Golani

A veteran of the American war in Iraq, Golani was authorized by al Qaeda's central command to form an offshoot of the terrorist group in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra. Little else is known about this young fighter, whose al-Nusra front is now fighting both the Assad regime and ISIL forces. Insiders refuse to confirm whether this photo, released by the Iraqi government, is really Golani.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi

Little is known about the shadowy commander of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the more extreme of two al Qaeda offshoots fighting in the Syrian civil war. Baghdadi, an Iraqi, was the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq before it expanded to become ISIL. The U.S. State Department has branded the 42-year-old Baghdadi, also known as Ibrahim Ali Al-Badri Al-Samarrai, a “specially designated global terrorist.” According to some estimates, he commands more than 5,000 foreign fighters.

Ayman al-Zawahiri

A physician and leader of al Qaeda, al-Zawahiri is neither as charismatic nor as revered as his predecessor, Osama bin Laden. He has had trouble controlling al-Baghdadi and his ISIL offshoot.

The truth was that al Qaeda had never really been an established presence in Syria. Historically, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood and its more violently sectarian offshoot, the Fighting Vanguard, were the country’s most prominent Islamist organizations. In the mid-1970s, they were at the forefront of a radical Sunni insurgency against the secular government of Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad. But by 1982 they had been effectively extinguished in Syria, after the February massacre of as many as 20,000 people in the central city of Hama. Membership in the Brotherhood was made a capital offense, prompting most of those who survived the purge to flee overseas. Several hundred were tossed into the notorious Sednaya military prison, some 20 miles north of the capital Damascus, and forgotten.

Syria’s main association with al Qaeda came later, when it served as a key transit route for jihadis entering Iraq to fight coalition troops after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion. According to a cache of al Qaeda in Iraq personnel files captured in 2007 in the Iraqi border town of Sinjar, every single one of the 600-plus foreign fighters in the records had entered Iraq from Syria. Some, including top U.S. officials, have concluded that the Syrian government was complicit in the movement of these men through its territory, and that in so doing it achieved two objectives—domestically, it (temporarily) rid itself of potential threats from homegrown Islamists, and regionally, it would help hobble an American force that might turn its attention to Syria next.

In 2004 and 2005, some of these battle-hardened Syrian jihadis started returning home. Their arrival coincided with a spate of small bombings and shootouts with security forces, which continued over the next few years. Many of those who were captured were placed in the three-story Sednaya military prison. The Brotherhood men who had been detained in the ‘70s and ‘80s were on the second floor. The 400 or so more recent jihadis lived in isolation on the third floor, in an area the inmates termed “the black door” because the men behind it were so cut off from other inmates.Their jailers called it the al Qaeda wing. On March 15, 2011—the date widely considered the start of the Syrian revolution, when thousands took to the country’s streets to call for greater freedoms—another 300 Islamists were transferred from a detention center in Damascus to Sednaya.

Faced with what had become a burgeoning nationwide protest movement, Assad had offered some reforms, mostly cosmetic, in hopes of averting full-blown revolt—while also allowing his security forces to shoot into crowds of demonstrators, beating and detaining thousands. The Syrian regime also issued new laws to permit several general prison amnesties, including Decree No. 61 in May 2011, which covered “all members of the Muslim Brotherhood and other detainees belonging to political movements,” another in June, as well as Decrees No. 161 and 53, which ended the country’s years-long state of emergency and abolished the Supreme State Security Court, respectively. Sednaya housed pretrial detainees nabbed under the state of emergency laws, awaiting sentencing, and those on whom the court had passed judgment. Many incarcerated Islamists were released—men like Abu Othman, a senior shari’iy, or Islamic legal scholar.

Abu Othman is a stocky but not muscular man in his late 30s with a bulbous nose, small, honey-colored eyes and a chest-length red-tinged beard. I met him in Kassab, a Syrian border town close to Turkey, in mid-April 2014, just a few weeks after Islamist rebels had captured the town. (By mid-June, regime forces had won it back.) He is now a senior shari’y in Jabhat al-Nusra. When he’s not fighting, he provides religious instruction to his unit’s men and serves as a judge in sharia courts.

Rania Abouzeid is an independent journalist who has covered the Middle East and Pakistan for 15 years.